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TRADITION
The
gothic painters must obviously have known
how
things appear, though they chose not to peer.
They
knew that folds will swallow a fleur-de-lys
but
still, they said, we’ll keep the pattern even
then
paint the folds: flowers and folds faultless
as
in life they never are. Of
course
the
abysmal sea is not green draper’s rolls,
and
we know dragons are not dogs with wings.
And
they were true to something true in eyesight:
the
pattern floating over the Virgin’s gown
lacked
a dimension and was thus protected
from
beauty and apparent innocence.
But
bales of water, slapped together monsters,
we
see for what they are, the fat insistence
of
an old monk putting a novice down.
He
fiercely sees the thing as it was taught him,
too
satisfied with that one good idea
to
lose it for a world more multiplied,
who’ll
never see, if he lives to be two hundred,
Matteo
di Giovanni’s tall Assumption,
Bellini’s
Doge’s strict perplexity.
Alan
Marshfield
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